Those of you with better memory may remember this. Development of this was started before those of us who run GeekShed left WyldRyde. For obvious reasons, development was postponed and has, fairly recently, resumed.

For those of you who don’t remember, here is an overview…

GeekShed is releasing a network wide bot system named ShedServ. This is a modular system, written in Java. It links directly to the GeekShed network and provides services to channel owners. Because the system is so extensible, there is little that it cannot do and we are more than happy to take suggestions for features which you, the channel owners, would like.

At present, the core of the system is written. We also have 2 modules – one for enabling your channel in the system and the other for creating and assigning bots to your channel. The first feature creating module that shall be written is a responder module. This will allow channel owners to add triggers to the bot which will trigger a response, when used in the channel. For example, you will be able to add a !site trigger which says “Our website is http://www.somesite.com/ – Visit us today!”.

Other features for the future are RSS feed parsing, ability to register nicknames from the GeekShed website and many others that I cannot remember right now.

ETA of this system is currently unknown but we hope to have it complete within the next 2 weeks. Once it is released, we are looking for testers. The requirements to become a tester are…

First a foremost, you MUST understand that this is an experimental system and that you are TESTING it. You must also accept that you may find bugs and exploits in it and that it really isn’t clever to cause havoc, using these. These bugs and exploits should be reported to #help to get them fixed for the stable release.

Your channel must have a user average of 5+ users.

You must also tweet or blog about GeekShed, your favourite channels and this blog post.

You must finally comment on this post to say that you would like to try the system, stating your nickname, your channel and the link to your tweet or blog post.

As of 17 November, 2009 – We do! This is currently a purely experimental feature but we would greatly appreciate your testing and feedback on it. You can connect to GeekShed’s IPv6 Round Robin at ipv6.geekshed.net.